


They'll Miss Us

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [132]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU in which there is no bloody Thanos, Established Relationship, M/M, Odin's A+ Parenting, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 07:04:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15903306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Two takes on life on Earth after Ragnarok.





	They'll Miss Us

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: it’s been a week and you’ve already managed to gather a cult. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).
> 
> My mind would not settle in one direction this AM, so forgive this two-for-one shot.

**Take 1**

“It’s been a week,” Loki said drily, “and I see you’ve already managed to gather a cult.”

Thor looked up from his coffee, wide-eyed, his fingers caught in the faded pages of a newspaper. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you? Of course you don’t. You can be so purposefully blind sometimes, Thor.” Loki slipped into the chair opposite his brother. “Half the place is making eyes at you at the moment. The young woman behind the counter is considering proposing marriage. That gaggle of boys over by the window has become a fugue of jealous awe. And the dapper-looking lady at the bar has taken a half-dozen pictures of you with her phone. And you’ve noticed none of it, have you?”

Thor colored, the skin beneath his beard running pink. “I’ve been engaged in my own business.”

“So no, then.”

“What difference does it make?” Thor said. “People will look where they like. I’m not trying to attract their attention.”

Loki picked up his brother’s mug and took a long, rather disappointing sip. “It’s not their attention I’m worried about. It’s your Avenger friends. I thought we’d agreed it was preferable to avoid them, at least until our people were settled in.”

“Hmmm. Yes.” Thor looked a bit sheepish. “I’d supposed that we were far enough away from their purview. I’d forgotten how obsessed Midgardians are about instant news and photos and such.”

“Social media, darling. It’s called social media.”

Thor handed him a floppy, affectionate smile. It was out of place here, that smile, in this faded, sleepy cafe at four o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of someplace called South Dakota. The fall sunshine outside was already beginning its slow surrender to the gray, tugging with it the first breath of winter, and yet, despite his better judgement, said smile made Loki’s fool heart skip a beat.

"Yes, well," Thor said. "You knew what I meant."

Loki set down the now-empty mug and let his fingers find Thor’s on the table. Dry, they were, like the many leaves that littered the sidewalk, but warm, too, solid and firm.

“Will you walk me home, kind sir?” Loki said.

“If you like.” A squeeze. “I’ll even check for monsters under your bed, if that would help.”

“If you like. I do rather prefer them in my bed than below it.”

  
  
  
**Take 2**

The first weeks on Midgard are not quite what Loki expects--mainly because no one seems to notice (or care) that they’re there.

Part of it, certainly, is that Thor shows no interest in teaming up with his Avenger friends again. He makes a point, when they are close enough to Earth, of crowding their people on to three smaller ships--the _Nina_ , the _Pinta_ , and the _Santa Maria_ , Loki dubs them, though no one else finds this amusing--and leaving the bulk of the _New Asgard_ behind, manned by Heimdal and a skeleton crew.

“If all goes well,” Loki hears Thor tell the All-Seer, “we’ll return for you soon.”

Heimdal, of course, being Heimdal, smiles his imperious, _nothing ever surprises me_ smile, and says: “Yes, my king. You will.”

Thor leads them to someplace called Western Canada, a land of trees and rocks and rugged hills. There are humans about, not too far away, but most of their early days are spent in peaceful exile with only more interesting Midgardian creatures like wolves and mountain lions and great, horned birds about. It is, though Loki is loathe to admit it, incredibly peaceful, almost idyllic.

His brother disappears here and there--off to negotiate with the Earthers, Loki guesses--but Thor’s always home for supper, for the big, raucous meals organized by those among the Aesir who have ached all these long months in space to be able to roast something over a long spit again. He sits at Loki’s side most nights--though sometimes Korg snags him and plants him between a rock and sharp place, i.e., Miek’s right hand--and sometimes lies with him, too, curled in the same tent beneath the vast, pockmarked canopy above that they’ve come to know so well since they let Hela destroy the only home either of them has ever known.

Notably, however, though they rest side-by-side, Thor and Loki in those first weeks of landfall do not touch, not as they did aboard the _New Asgard_ , an old pleasure gratefully rediscovered and happily found. The need hasn’t left Loki, nor his brother, he’s fairly sure, but the new king seems reluctant to indulge with their people so close, with nothing but the wind between their tent and those whom together they saved.

There is a prudishness in Thor, the great beautiful brute, that Loki finds both infuriating and incredibly charming; an easy button, sometimes, to push. But there comes a time on Earth, soon, when even Thor’s propriety cannot hold back what he needs.

At first it’s a kiss or two, here and there. In the shadows of the evening’s great fire, perhaps, or on the edge of a cold, silver stream. In the clutch of two trees, or beneath the sharp eyes of the stars.

And then one morning, Thor cruelly drags Loki from sleep and makes him join a hunting party, of all the damnable things.

Loki hates hunting, always has, and in his not-quite-awake haze, he’s horrified to think that Thor might have forgotten this, a fact that so painfully defined their earliest days. Odin had never taken Loki’s objections to heart, ever, had always bundled him shouting onto a horse behind his brother’s back and slapped a blade into his hand, or a reed-thin, diamond-sharp staff.

“You will go with this party,” Odin would say in his deepest voice, the most threatening, the voice that could bring the furies of Asgard to bear, “and you will slay a creature of the forest yourself, Loki, with your own two hands, and you will not return to here until you have done so, until you can prove to me you can wield more than a woman’s tricks. Do you understand me?”

And Loki, tears in his eyes that he could not let fall, would nod his head and clutch his weapon and fight the strange, awful urge to plunge it into his father’s own heart.

“Good. Do as I have asked and you’ll be rewarded, my son. Do not”--the All-Father let his his words hang in the air like a storm front, ominous--“and there will be punishment for your failings, yes?”

“Yes,” Loki would say. “Yes, Father.”

Before him, hands closed around the horse’s reins, he would feels Thor trembling, anger wound up tight in his back, threatening to break out, to break free, to make the terrible situation much, much worse. So he would squeeze Thor’s waist with his free hand, a childish kind of reassurance, and lean his head between his brother’s shoulders: _shut up._

At last, Odin would be satisfied with his threats and slap the horse’s rear and off they’d set on the heels of the hunters, women and men of their father’s court charged with this glorious purpose: murder in the name of a king.

On Earth, then, life upon lifetimes later, Loki’s startled when Thor volunteers them both to join some of these same women and men in a hunt built on need, not ceremony; now, what must be appeased is the people’s hunger, not their king’s desire for an ancient sort of glory. They have no horses now, only their feet; no golden lances or glorious elf-forged blades, only the everyday weapons close at hand when the battle for Asgard began, and yet the animals of the Earth--the stags and the hares--prove little match.

It sickens Loki, the prospect of so much death. No matter how hungry his people may be.

So it angers him, Thor’s insistence that he comes along, up and until the moment when his brother grabs his wrist and drags him behind a beast of a tree, its trunk twice as broad at Loki’s body. Loki opens his mouth to snarl, the morning’s frustration caught up in a snit, but Thor steps into him, silences him, with his quick, eager sink of a mouth.

It’s not until their tongues touch, until Thor’s hand tears at Loki’s hem and finds the chill damp of his back, that Loki’s mind catches up to his body, that his hands fly up to catch the sheep-shorn of Thor’s hair, that his thighs spread and allow Thor’s own to wedge between them.

His brother has stiffened already, the great anxious heat of his cock twitching against Loki’s hip, and oh, he must have been planning this all morning, since they rose before the sun; scoping out each section of forest and testing each tree against his desires, against the image he’d formed in his mind of Loki pinned beneath him, the others in their party clueless, their eyes fixed pointedly up ahead.

There are a hundred things Loki might say, little taunts he might throw at Thor; when he’s in his cups of need like this, when he’s big and ready and rutting, Thor likes to be talked to, like to have Loki’s mouth curl around all the wicked things that he wants, the many ways in which he wishes Thor would take him apart. Truth be told, in moments like this, Loki likes to hear his own voice, too.

But it’s been too long, too many days without what had become an everyday pleasure: hands upon skin; kisses traded, exchanged; trousers opened and any secrets between them tugged out full into the light. Loki cannot contain himself enough to speak, much less to be clever, and in the end, he relies solely on sound, on the turn of his nails, on a kind of wordless begging that has Thor roaring in his ear as his fist finds Loki’s cock and pulls out each and every bottled-up drop.

He comes embarrassingly fast, does Loki, with leaves in his hair and bark biting his boots, so fast that he feels boneless, beautifully crushed, a bystander to his brother’s rush towards climax. Thor’s mouth never leaves his and Loki never lets go of him, fingers still stretched in his hair, others twined with Thor’s over that great, lovely dick and Thor is not so careful with himself, not so kind; when he comes, he keeps jerking himself with the same fervor, the same absolute ocean of need, and as Loki clings to him, wishes for some goddamn privacy and a bed, Thor comes again, spunk seeping into Loki’s shirt, over his cock, in warm, oozing shocks.

“We can’t stay like this forever,” Loki murmurs finally, when his brother’s spend has gone chilly, when even he is trembling in the cold. “They’ll come looking.”

Thor raises his head, the patch over his eye gently catching Loki’s temple. “I don’t care.”

“You do. Obviously, you do.” Loki traces the lines of Thor’s back. “Otherwise, you’d have taken me in a tent like a proper oaf instead of manhandling me out in the open like this.”

Thor chuckles, tucks the sound into Loki’s neck. “Is that what I’ve done? Manhandled you?”

“No, my darling. You’ve ignored me.”

That earns him a soft, wounded sound and a kiss, sweet and searching. “Have I, _kanin_? I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t called me that in years.”

“I know.”

“There was a time when you’d call me nothing else.”

“There was a time when you earned it. You did nothing but run; away from me, from Odin. Even from mother.”

Loki kisses Thor again. It’s easier than saying _I don’t want to talk about it_. Easier than explaining why. And Thor, bless him, has always been easily distracted by Loki’s mouth.

“They’ll miss us,” he repeats, giving his brother a shove. “Pull up your trousers, my king.”


End file.
